A tale of 2 anniversaries: Pearl Harbor did not dominate news on its 10th anniversary

First-responders during the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center tour the USS Arizona Memorial in August.

Associated Press

HONOLULU — After the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, newspapers from Boston to Bakersfield, Calif., reached into the distant past to find the words to capture the moment for their front pages. One typical headline blared: "A New Day of Infamy."

President Franklin D. Roosevelt had used the same word to describe the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor — "Dec. 7, 1941, a date which will live in infamy" — and invoking it for 9/11 is just one example of how many Americans drew parallels between the two attacks.

Now, as the nation prepares for the 10-year anniversary of 9/11, a look at how Americans marked the same milestone for Pearl Harbor shows that the way people commemorate events sometimes says more about their own times than a bygone era.

"They may be looking back at an event that happened years or decades before, but the way people think about them is governed by what's going on in their own historical context," said Michael Slackman, who has written books about Pearl Harbor.

"Each generation will give different meaning to the same historical events based on the issues that they're concerned about," he said.

In 1951, it was communism. Thousands of Americans were dying on the front lines of the Korean War, the U.S. was in the early years of a nuclear arms race with the Soviet Union and cities were holding air raid drills to prepare for atomic attacks.

Pausing to remember Pearl Harbor didn't dominate the news, nor, according to anecdotal newspaper accounts, was it at the forefront for many Americans.

On Dec. 7 of that year, the top headlines told of the latest news from Korea.

Many newspapers put the Pearl Harbor anniversary on their front pages, but they squeezed it in among the dozen or so stories commonly crammed on a page in those days. Many relegated it to the bottom of the front page.

LIFE, a weekly magazine that was among the most prominent publications of the time, made no mention of the anniversary in either its Dec. 3 or Dec. 10 editions, said Emily Rosenberg, a history professor at University of California, Irvine.

The only mention of Japan, Rosenberg said, came in a story about American servicemen from the Korean War seeking respite at Japanese baths attended to by "'plump Japanese girls in pale blue play skirts.'"

There were several ceremonies in Hawaii to remember the attack.

The one at Pearl Harbor was only for the Navy, which had recently installed a small platform and flagpole at the sunken wreck of the USS Arizona.

Other memorials, including a Catholic mass at a cathedral and a ceremony at a national cemetery in Honolulu, remembered the Pearl Harbor dead alongside those killed in World War II and the Korean War.

Some even had trouble remembering Pearl Harbor at all.

A reporter for The Springfield Union in Springfield, Mass., found that only three of 23 people interviewed on the city's main street remembered why the day was significant. Even in Hawaii, some were unaware. A reporter for the Honolulu Star-Bulletin found that six of 15 people polled on Dec. 7 didn't know it was the anniversary.

Rosenberg noted Pearl Harbor was the opening shot in a long war in which more than 400,000 Americans died. She said few in the early 1950s felt a need to elevate those who died on Dec. 7 when so many had been killed in World War II and the Korean War.

"It's only later on I think that it comes to have this singular status," said Rosenberg, whose book "A Date Which Will Live: Pearl Harbor in American Memory" examines how Americans have looked back on the attack over the years.

Editorials recalled how the day marked the beginning of World War II for the U.S., but they also cited Pearl Harbor as an example of the peril facing the nation from communism and the Soviet Union.

Popular Comments

I too am miffed. Why are we celebrating the al-Qaida Victory of shattering so
many lives? My impression of how this event is being portrayed in America as a
day of honor really terrifies me. Obama wishes it would unite us but this is not
the kind of
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